Fred Aiken Writing

The signal came late on a Wednesday night, just seconds before Kathy would have gotten up to collect her things and leave the lab for the day.

“Come quick, Cassius!” she called for her lab partner whom she had an on-again-off-again relationship for the past few years. 

“What is it?”

“There’s a signal.”

“Someone’s trying to contact us?”

“Or something?”

“Either way, it has to be sentient in some manner.”

“Who do you think it is?”

“I dunno. Do you think we should respond?”

“Sure, why not? That’s the whole reason this lab was set up in the first place. I think we’d be doing a disservice to our patrons if we didn’t make contact.”

So Kathy and Cassius spent the next five hours drinking coffee and coming up with ideas on how to respond to the message. It was important they get it just right. They couldn’t just say ‘hello’. Whatever they thought of might set the tone for the rest of human history. It could be the reason foreign invaders destroy all life. They settled on sending an echo response that mimicked that of the original just in case. That way there could be no confusion.

A few thousand years later, Kathy and Cassius had died, but an armada showed up at the doorstep to their bodies’ burial site to put down flowers and say ‘hello’.